Today's media players support various different audio formats such as mp3, mp4, WMA (Windows Media Audio), AAC (Advanced Audio Coding), HE-AAC (High Efficiency AAC) etc. On the other hand, media databases (such as Simfy) provide millions of audio files for download. Typically, it is not economical to encode and store these millions of audio files in the various different audio formats and the various different bit-rates that may be supported by the different media players. As such, it is beneficial to provide fast audio encoding schemes which enable encoding of audio files “on the fly”, thereby enabling media databases to generate a particularly encoded audio file (in a particular audio format, at a particular bit-rate) as and when it is requested.